Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Bored Review - Day 3

The above slide was my favorite one of the day. The topic was irritable bowel syndrome. I hope you're not offended; the slide was not meant to be demeaning. Actually, I may even use this to try to better communicate with my patients. The speaker tells her patients, "So you have Bristol Type 3 then, right?" That's interesting. (image credit)

Being in full-time private practice, it's really difficult for me to try to keep up with the latest and greatest medical literature. Attending this conference really has reminded me of just a thirst for knowledge. Back at home, it's just a rat race sometimes -- just trying to complete all the tasks of my day before I fall asleep.

I've come to miss a little bit of the academic slant of medicine. One of the buzz words these days is "evidence based medicine." A better way of saying that is this: Why do you make the treatment choices you do in medicine? Is there medical literature (ie - research evidence) to back up why you make your choice?

In day-to-day practice, I'm busy dealing with paperwork, insurance companies, medicolegal stuff, etc. It's really difficult to keep up with the medical knowledge that is constantly changing on a daily basis. I know what my patients are reading, because I keep up with the popular press. But, sitting down and going through research studies -- this take a lot of brain power on my part to really break it down. There are (too often) times that I'm too tired or not enough time to do that.

On another kind of related topic, I did get to visit a friend of mine here in town. (Yes, I did skip part of the conference. Oh well.) He works at the medical school and I got to see him in action teaching a little bit. I've never seen the "work side" of this guy before - we're usually socializing and making fun of people at the bar at meetings that we go to.

My experience this afternoon reminded me how much I miss teaching medical students and residents. That's a really good time (at least for me). Maybe someday when I've gotten really cynical of private practice, maybe a career change to academics could work. We'll see.

Sorry for the rambling. It's kind of been a little different blogging this week. Like I've said before, I like a little different change of pace sometimes. Hope you're week is going well so far.